distressed

1. 1
   adjective

   Feeling anxious, upset, or troubled in mind.

   He grew increasingly distressed as the deadline approached.

   Passengers looked distressed when the flight was suddenly canceled.

   Similardistraught, pained, agonised, tortured, heartsore

   Oppositecalm, relaxed, composed, untroubled

   Note

   Distress of mind has a long literary record. Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors pities a "poor distressed soul", and the King James Bible of 1611 places the word on a scale: "troubled on every side, yet not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair." Distressed sits beyond troubled and just short of despair. Bunyan's "greatly distressed in his mind" names where the trouble lives. Modern use drops that phrase and often adds a that-clause instead.

2. 2
   adjective

   Showing damage, wear, or harm.

   Surveyors marked the distressed beams for immediate replacement.

   The storm left several roofs distressed and leaking badly.

   Similardamaged, worn, deteriorated, weakened

   Oppositesound, intact, undamaged

   Note

   Mostly a word for goods: distressed merchandise, distressed stock. Here the damage is real and unwanted. That sets it apart from the deliberately aged sense, where the wear is put there on purpose to please the buyer. When a description could go either way, the surrounding words usually decide whether distressed means "marked down" or "made to look old".

3. 3
   adjective

   Deliberately faded, scratched, or worn to give a new object an old or antique appearance.

   Designers favored distressed leather for the new furniture collection.

   Each panel was sanded and stained to look distressed.

   Similaraged, weathered, worn

   Note

   Furniture was the first home of this sense, but the treatment has spread well beyond it. Carolyn Purnell's Blue Jeans (2022) calls distressed jeans a luxury because they "bear all the signs of exertion" the wearer never made. In 2024, lawyers for Damien Hirst accepted that his works had been "made to look older or distressed". In design the word is a neutral selling point. Where an object's real age matters, the same treatment becomes a point of dispute.

4. 4
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of distress.

   The constant noise distressed everyone in the office.

   He was distressed to learn that the project had failed.

   Note

   The verb behind this form has three jobs. It can mean to cause anxiety, to give a new object an aged look, or to distrain, which means to seize property against a debt. The first two lead straight to the anxious sense and to antiqued furniture. After be, the line between verb and adjective blurs: "he was distressed to learn" describes a state as much as an action.

5. 5
   adjective

   Suffering financial or operational trouble, such as default or bankruptcy.

   The fund specializes in distressed assets trading well below their value.

   Lenders restructured the loans of several distressed firms.

   Similartroubled, ailing, insolvent

   Oppositehealthy, solvent, thriving

   Note

   In finance the word names a market category as much as a condition: distressed debt, distressed assets, and the funds that specialize in buying them. In 2019 The Economist put such debt at ten percentage points or more over Treasuries, which is the price of its risk. Sam Zell, who called himself "the Grave Dancer", said buying distressed assets was less dancing on graves than "raising the dead".

6. 6
   adjective

   Put up for sale by a lender following foreclosure on the former owner.

   Buyers crowded the auction hoping to snap up distressed properties.

   The neighborhood had many distressed listings after the crash.

   Note

   Property is the thing this sense attaches to: a distressed property, a distressed listing. The seller is the lender rather than the former owner. The price is typically set below market value so the outstanding loan can be recovered quickly. It is a narrower, real-estate cousin of the finance sense, which covers any company or asset in serious trouble.

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